Stuff I Have Not Shown You

The sharp-shinned hawk (I'm about 65% sure it was sharp-shinned) came back. And ate. I didn't get a sharper photo, but you probably didn't want to see any closer anyhow.

The way I got my knitting mojo back the last time it pegged out was by knitting some boring, uncomplicated dishcloths.
I finally remembered that, so I got out an old project, almost finished, and finally cast it off. It was the small double-knitted square on the bottom left made of crochet cotton on US size 1 needles (2.5 mm).

Then I went through Mary Thomas and tried what she calls "Rib-Welt Fabrics", with alternating squares of 1-1 rib and garter stitch. (Bottom right above.)

(These are what I call "spa washcloths", after an eleven-dollar washcloth I saw in a catalog once.)

By then I was interested in knitting again, and I knitted the edge on the green background to the left.

I knitted around the corner, just like an Orenberg shawl (the going around the corner: the border itself is from the old dishcloth my husband rescued from the armory).

Then I knitted the bottom edge, turned the second corner, and picked up stitches to knit from edge to edge (the cloth on the needle at the top). The pattern in the center is Mary Thomas's "Diagonal Rib and Check Combined" from page 41 of her Book of Knitting Patterns.

Once I've knitted it nearly square, I'll turn the corner at one edge, and knit on a sideways border like the Pi shawl's, then turn one final corner and graft 8 stitches.

And apparently that broke the dam, because Friday I joined a knit-along for Herbert Niebling's "Leberblümchen" from Kunststricken: Große und kleine Decken.
I'm always knitting with thread on tiny needles, so I decided to break out of that rut and use yarn and US 5 (3.75 mm) needles. It's so . . . large. It grows so fast!

And I'm not sure how easy this yarn will be to block. There may be wailing and gnashing of teeth. We'll see.

Meanwhile, all I have to do is figure out how I'm supposed to knit the two separate end sections to make this come out oval. (And decide if I'm going to jazz around with it or knit it as written.)